Tag: Aya Ohmasa

Christmas is synonymous with romance in Japan, but should you really rush into love just to get a pretty picture under the bright lights of a shopping mall holiday display? Perhaps not, but rom-coms are not generally the best place to look for realistic dating advice. “Realistic dating advice” is what the lovelorn heroine of My Long Awaited Love Story (わたしに運命の恋なんてありえないって思ってた, Watashi ni Unmei no Koi nante Arienaitte Omotteta) ends up giving when she runs into a socially awkward CEO with a crush on an employee, but in true rom-com fashion finds herself falling for him instead.

27-year-old Riko (Mikako Tabe) has given up on love, at least in the “real” world. Ironically enough, her job is writing romantic storylines for dating sims at which she is apparently very successful which is why she’s been hired as a consultant by a tech firm looking to branch out in the hope of capturing the female market. The problem is that the more she observes “real” guys in the world all around her, the more they disappoint. The handsome “prince” at a coffee shop says all the right things but then claims to have forgotten his wallet. The clingy cutie has another girl on the line, and the domineering Type-A hunk crumbles in front of a strong woman. Riko knows that Hollywood-style meet cutes don’t happen in everyday life, but finds herself repeatedly running into them only for something to burst her bubble unexpectedly.

At the meeting for her new game, the assembled team being almost entirely female which, when you think about it, is a little bit depressing because it means the boss has used it to get all the women off the floor, Riko is taken by the handsome, sensitive Midoritani (Jun Shison) but gets a rude awakening when another guy turns up and immediately makes it clear he hates all her ideas. According to him, women who play dating sims must be ugly or stupid, the sort of people unwilling to see reality, retreating into a frothy fantasy land to escape their unhappy lives. Thoroughly fed up, Riko sets him right, only to realise this man, Kurokawa (Issey Takahashi), is actually the president of the company.

They haven’t exactly hit it off, and Riko is further enraged when she overhears him giving an interview to a women’s magazine in which he claims to be “supporting women”, parroting all the words she threw at him to make himself sound progressive. Gently teasing him about his obvious crush on Momose (Aya Ohmasa), a pretty employee, however brings them a little closer and earns her an apology. Kurokawa takes some of her advice, tries out a tactic from a game she wrote, finds it kind of works, and eventually asks her to teach him the ways of love. Despite feeling under confident in her own love life as an unattached 27-year-old, she agrees.

Gradually we discover that Riko’s taste for romantic fantasy is a clear eyed choice designed to keep her “safe” from heartbreak because it’s not real and the idealised 2D guys from her games are never going to let her down. Annoyingly, Kurokawa was right up to a point, but you can’t deny that the world Riko lives in is in itself disappointing, a fiercely sexist society in which the men are timid children and the women socially conditioned not to make the first move. Kurokawa’s courtship of Momose, it has to be said, borders on harassment considering he’s the boss and she’s much younger than he is. Early on, Riko outs herself as a youthful devote of shojo manga, given unrealistic ideas about romance from idealised stories of innocent love filled with charming, handsome princes and infinite happy endings. Riko wanted to fall in love like that, which is to say, unrealistically without fully engaging with all the difficult bits of being in a relationship.

Needless to say, she begins to fall for Kurokawa who, for all his awkwardness, has a good a heart and the willingness to learn. Thanks to him she gets the courage to humiliate a bunch of high school bullies at a reunion, but still struggles with the idea of opening herself up to “real” love and the possibility of heartbreak. When Kurokawa has a crisis and calls her, she knows where he’ll be but sends Momose instead, either out of a sense of awkwardness or perhaps just afraid to face him in such an emotional state. A professional humbling and the miracle of Christmas conspire to convince them both that you’ll never be happy hiding your feelings and if you want “real” love you’ll have to accept the risk of getting hurt. That’s reality for you, but it can probably wait until after the festive season.